DURHAM, NC.- The Lyndhurst Gallery, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, presents Disfarmer - Photographs from the Studio of Mike Disfarmer, Heber Springs, Arkansas 1939–1946, on view through April 6, 2008. There is much that we don’t know about Mike Disfarmer, but what we do know makes for a great story. He was born Mike Meyer in Indiana in 1884. When he was eight, his family moved to Arkansas­-though later in life he claimed to have been blown there by a tornado and dropped in the Meyers’ yard. At the age of fifty, not long after his mother’s death, he made the local paper when he legally changed his last name from Meyer to Disfarmer. The reporter explained the change this way: “Since ‘meyer’ means ‘farmer’ in German, and since the petitioner was not a farmer, he chanced upon the name ‘Disfarmer.’ ‘Dis’ is said to mean ‘not’ in German.”). In adopting this new identity, Disfarmer distanced himself from his family and seemed to imply his superiority to other locals. A confirmed bachelor who made a point of telling people that he didn’t believe in the Bible, he succeeded in creating a persona that was both insider and outsider in the small mountain town of Heber Springs, Arkansas, where he’d lived since 1914.

This eccentric, reportedly friendless man chose to operate a portrait studio for forty years. He documented significant and random moments in the lives of rural Arkansas families through the end of the Depression and World War II. No warm conversation, no props, no frills; an irregular tack for the traditionally gregarious profession of portrait photographer. His neighbors, all white, predominantly working class, came as they were, and as they wanted to be remembered: in work clothes, in uniform, in their Sunday best. They are hearty individuals living through challenging times, sliced from a virtually homogenous life. The frank, arresting portraits Disfarmer made stand as a compelling record of the home front. The community he held at a distance; his camera, he caressed.

This exhibition presents classic Disfarmer images ­ posthumous prints from glass-plate negatives made between 1939 and 1946 ­ that were discovered two years after the photographer’s death by former Heber Springs mayor Joe Albright when he purchased the contents of the studio for five dollars. A selection of these images was first published in the Arkansas Sun (Peter Miller, editor) and Modern Photography (Julia Scully, editor) in 1975.

The Disfarmer Project, a reclamation effort launched in 2004 by Michael Mattis, has brought vintage prints spanning Disfarmer’s full forty-year career in Heber Springs to the public’s attention.

A special thanks to the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City for the loan of these prints.

This exhibition is presented in conversation with the Bill Frisell Trio's The Disfarmer Project: Musical Portraits from Heber Springs, March 1, 8 p.m., Reynolds Industries Theater, West Campus, Duke University­part of Statements of Fact: Documentary in Performance, a series offered by Duke Performances.